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Inquiry ‘Fun’

Not much to say today, mes amis – I’m curled up with a hot water bottle, and watching the Leveson Inquiry. For those not in the UK or uninterested in clicking a Wikipedia link:

‘The Leveson Inquiry is an ongoing public inquiry into the culture, practices and ethics of the British press following the News International phone hacking scandal.‘

For those in the United States, News International is owned by Rupert Murdoch, who you might better know as the benevolent owner of Faux Fox News. In short, they have been hacking the crap out of peoples’ phones for tabloid purposes, and either claiming that it was in the public interest, or that those at the top didn’t know a thing. And, much like Fox in the States, the Murdochs were doing their best to get a bigger slice of the attention over here too. With those two facts in mind, there’s a very long public inquiry going on, and it’s fairly damning. I don’t know the state of play in the States, but I am aware that there are claims that they tried to hack into the phones of 9/11 victims and their families. I’ve also heard claims of intimidation on both side of the ponds, but I don’t know the veracity of that outside of this island. I think that the younger Murdoch (who is on the stand today; you can follow along on The Guardian website), who is a British citizen, will probably end up in prison one way or the other. I suspect it will be rank tokenism and be an incredibly short imprisonment, but I don’t see how they could let him off the hook either. Maybe they’ll just settle for jailing Rebekah Brooks… but we’ll see. James is either incredibly guilty or incredibly incompetent, and neither are going to look good on him whatever the end result.

While I am enjoying James’ blather, the day and a half dedicated to his cher pére Rupert will be very interesting. Last time around, the pair were giving answers together, with James often answering on behalf of his father. If any of you have seen Ru’s Twitter, then you know that he is frankly frightening without his minders keeping an eye on things. A day and a half of him being questioned under oath should be very interesting, to say the least. I half-wonder if he’ll ‘have a heart attack’ or something of the like under instruction, or if he manages to dig a world-wide grave to bury himself in. Whatever the case, I have a feeling it will be more interesting, telling, and damning than anything his son manages… unless he too claims amnesia and decides to go the ‘I’m incompetent!’ route his son has chosen to follow. We shall indeed see.

So yeah, off to try and cram some work or something into their hour lunch break, ha ha.